Wired profiles Andy Rubin, founder of Android, and quite a fascinating character. His new gig, Playground, seeks to create, fund and support companies writing software and hardware building blocks for an AI-enabled future.

Research, development and resources

Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning, Google DeepMind and University of Montreal. Stabilising deep reinforcement learning often requires lots of memory and computation because it uses experience replay: the idea of storing and sampling from an agent’s historical experience conducting a task. Here, the DeepMind team show that asynchronously running multiple agents in parallel on multiple instances of the environment is instead more effective and less computationally intensive. Check out this video for a demo application of an agent navigating a 3D video game environment.

Brain4Cars: Car That Knows Before You Do via Sensory-Fusion Deep Learning Architecture, Cornell University, Stanford University and Brain of Things Inc. This work explores the problem of anticipating a car driver’s next actions to safeguard said driver from eventual dangers that might result based on their current environment (e.g. turning and hitting an unseen bicycle). Using RNNs with LSTMs that act on videos, vehicle dynamics, GPS, and street maps, the system can anticipate manoeuvres 3.5 seconds before they occur in real time.

Venture capital financings and exits

$93m raised by 22 companies and $250m in exit value created, including the following notable transactions:

DataRobot, which allows data scientists to build and implement predictive applications using open source and custom machine learning, raised $33m Series B led by NEA.